Plane crashes northwest of Erie; pilot confirmed dead

A kit-built aircraft crashed Wednesday afternoon on Boulder County open space, killing the 66-year-old Loveland pilot.

The Boulder County coroner identified the pilot as David Biesemeier.

Several witnesses called 911 after seeing the plane, a Smyth Sidewinder, go down near 4900 N. 109 St. The crash site was a few hundred yards east of where 109th was washed out by September's flood, with the plane coming down in a washed-out area near Boulder Creek.

"I saw the left wing of the plane fall off; it looked like half to three-fourths," said Kira Cady, a Lookout Road resident who was cleaning up after her horses when the plane started to go down. "I heard the engine, and then the wing broke, and then I saw debris going down. I immediately called 911."

A piece of debris from the plane that crashed lies in the driveway of Lori Greene's home on 109th Street on Wednesday Nov. 27. (Lewis Geyer/Times-Call)

Debris was scattered over a wide area, with pieces of the plane found from Lookout Road south to Jasper Road.

No passengers were aboard.

The first calls were reported at 12:47 p.m. -- the exact time that Lori Greene of 4998 109th St. saw on her computer when she first heard what sounded like an explosion.

"I have animals, so I went to make sure no car had hit them," Greene said. "And when I came out, I saw debris in my neighbor's yard."

That included two large, long pieces of metal visible from her fence line. Even then, she said, she wasn't sure of what had happened until she saw the small pieces that had come down on her own land -- pieces of glass, metal, blue styrofoam and an air sickness bag.

"I certainly didn't think a plane had exploded and fallen out of the sky, but it didn't sound like a car accident," she said. "There were no tires screeching or anything like that. ... When I saw the motion sickness bag in my own yard, that's when I knew."

A plane tracker on the Denver International Airport website showed a general aviation aircraft heading north into the crash area at about 12:45 p.m. The plane abruptly disappeared from the tracker at that time.

"It was crazy," said Cady, who said she heard a "kaboom" at the end after the plane went down. "I was crossing my fingers that he was going to end up alive."

Authorities have not yet said where the plane was heading to or from. Several airports are within easy flying distance, including Erie Municipal Airport, Boulder Municipal Airport and Longmont's Vance Brand Municipal Airport. On warm days and weekends, Greene said, there's usually an aircraft over the area, sometimes doing aerobatics.

Vance Brand airport manager Tim Barth said the plane didn't appear to have taken off from Longmont.

"Nobody recognized that kind of aircraft being on the field or buying fuel today," Barth said. "That's not 100 percent certain, but it seems unlikely."

The cause of the crash is still under investigation. Officials from the Federal Aviation Administration arrived on the scene a little before 4 p.m.; additional personnel from the National Transportation Safety Board were expected to arrive later in the evening.

Boulder County sheriff's deputies, the Colorado State Patrol, Mountain View Fire Protection, and Lafayette police and fire also were at the scene of the crash. Authorities entered the plane shortly before 3 p.m., confirming the pilot's identity from identification in his wallet.

This was the first fatal plane crash in the Longmont area since a March 2012 collision between two small aircraft over eastern Longmont. One of the planes crashed near Weld County Road 1, killing an instructor and student pilot; the pilot of the second plane survived a crash-landing near Vance Brand airport.

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